CorelDraw 9 crashing badly

[JVegVT]

I had a horrible day today. I'm working on an 8-1/2 by 22" banner for my brother's 60th birthday. I wrote the text in my word processor and wanted to use CorelDraw 9 for the actual creation.

Unfortunately, CorelDraw kept crashing and when it died, it would corrupt the document. I did have backups, but even when I tried to save CD would crash. Everything seemed to cause a crash: changing a font, opening a docker, saving, adding a graphic. I finally gave up and worked on it in my desktop publisher/word processor (it'll be printed on my inkjet).

I copied the file to my laptop and tried working on it with CorelDraw 9 there. Same thing--crashes aplenty. It was unusable.

This rules out problems with my video card, mouse driver, RAM, or hard drive as the laptop is quite different. All I can think of is an offending font (though the font doesn't seem to be offending anything else) or a problem caused by a Windows update--not such an unusual thing to have happen.

Both computers are running Windows XP Home and both have 768 megs of RAM. CorelDraw 9 has always worked fine on both of them until today.

Has anyone else experienced problems with CD 9 lately?

I was ready to throw the computer out the window! Then I decided to see how I'd fare with Linux and I redid the document in Scribus, an up-and-coming high-level open source DTP program. This is the first thing I've worked on with Scribus and I was pleased. I have a LOT to learn, but it was reasonably easy to use and I'm learning where things are. Scribus can output to PDF, so I created a PDF and it looks good. I'm not quite done, but tomorrow I'll finish it up in Scribus.
--Judy M.